How High Can These Orioles Fly?

This morning, as most mornings, I sipped coffee from a garish orange and black coffee mug.  What's different this morning is that it's September, and the cartoon bird logo on the mug is that of a first place ballclub.

Last night, the Baltimore Orioles, plagued by years of terrible ownership, poor attendance, and the presumption of being the doormat in the AL East, the most difficult division in Major League Baseball, delivered a 12-0, 18-hit pounding on Toronto and moved into a first place tie with the New York Yankees at 76-59.

My Beloved Spousal Unit and I were frequent denizens at the old Memorial Stadium in Baltimore during our East Coast incarnation in the 1980's and early 1990's.  We'd drive up I-95 from Suburban D.C. through the streets of Baltimore, up Charles Street and down St. Paul, and perch in our seats like Shoe and The Perfessor from the Treetops Tattler-Tribune.  Whether alone or road-tripping with friends, we'd usually get lost in the city trying to make our way home -- especially at 1:00 a.m. on a Sunday night after a 12-inning game!

I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Frank Robinson, the Orioles manager from 1988 through 1991.  His Hall of Famer's self-confident bearing and shrewd managerial tactics taught my perceptive wife the intricacies of the game and turned her into a baseball fan for life.  (Thank you, Frank!)

After the high ceremony of the home plate relocation at the end of 1991, the grounds crew dressed in tux and tails, a new era for the Birds began near Baltimore's Inner Harbor in the new Oriole Park at Camden Yards.  We attended just a couple of games in April 1992; the beautiful, new ballpark with the throwback architecture was jam-packed both times.  But, as it happens, we moved away from the Free State of Maryland that season, just as the craze began.  The Orioles mug, a parting gift from our road-tripping friends, became a reminder of our good times. We followed the denouement of Cal Ripken's consecutive games streak and cheered Eddie Murray's 500th home run from afar.

A long, dark age for the Orioles followed, with fan frustration growing, contending teams rare, and the economics of Major League Baseball working against Eastern Division teams not in the Yankees-Red Sox and Mets-Phillies axes.  During those years, I thought Washington Post baseball writer Tom Boswell would suffer a stroke fuming over whatever was the latest cheapskate move by Baltimore owner Peter Angelos, before D.C. gained its franchise and diverted him.

But this year, somehow, some way, through draft choices and propitious signings, aided and abetted by a Yankees swoon and a Red Sox collapse, this flock of crazy birds has overcome its franchise-specific disadvantages and competed its way into a contending season.  Led by the team's three All-Stars, outfielder Adam Jones, catcher Matt Wieters, and 41-save closer Jim Johnson, and bolstered by a supporting cast of -- oh, who am I kidding!  I don't know who these guys are, and neither do most fans.  Faced with low television ratings and disappointing attendance, upstaged recently by the Washington Nationals to the south, it's been far too long since the national spotlight has shined on the O's, the cameras trained on the Baltimore skyline, the announcers eager to call B&O Warehouse home run shots.

I don't know much about these Birds, but I'm learning.  So is the rest of the baseball world.  I'm yearning once again to hear the fans yell "O's!" during the National Anthem.  I'd like to see how high this flock can fly.  It's time to sit back, enjoy a tasty beverage, and watch them earn their wings -- or try.

How's Your Manager's WOR?

It used to be, the only baseball statistics that counted were fairly simple: runs, hits, RBIs, batting average, on base percentage, slugging percentage, ERA, strikeouts and the like. Then, SABR came along, and Bill James and Moneyball, and suddenly we saw a proliferation of hybrid and derivative statistics like OPS -- on base percentage plus slugging percentage -- that may or may not compute in a dimensional analysis but are useful gauges of hitting prowess.

It's a struggle to keep up with all the new permutations and combinations that the stats geeks come up with to measure performance on the field -- what OPS is considered good, anyway? -- and I say that as a poser of a stats geek myself. Then, there's further analysis you can do once you fold in the business aspects of the game. Player payroll, stars' salaries per season, attendance figures, and season ticket equivalents all serve to indicate the health of a franchise.

In the competitive, metrics-oriented world of sports business, performance on the field is inevitably compared to ownership's investment in player salaries. Analysts originally began by measuring payroll per win. Then, some smart guy figured out that, if a team can win 60 games in a 162-game season even with a roster of Triple-A stiffs, the player payroll should be divided not by total wins but by wins in excess of 60 to determine spending efficiency.

(The ghost of Marvelous Marv Throneberry will thank you not to remind us of the New York Mets' magical 40-win inaugural season in 1962.)

Which brings us to managerial efficiency. If you or I were to manage a major league team -- which, after all, we do in our minds each time we watch a game -- how many wins would our team achieve, despite our indisputable incompetence? We need a baseline number in order to calculate managerial success as the number of wins over that figure.

Happily, the baseball gods have just bestowed an answer upon us. Today we learned that Washington Nationals manager Jim Riggleman reportedly took advantage of a rare winning stretch and super-.500 June record to insist that the Nationals GM Mike Rizzo pick up the manager's contract option for the following season. Rizzo, recalling the adage that the worst deal is the one that you make on someone else's timetable, and in any case we haven't seen July, August, or September yet, demured, and Riggleman resigned before a mid-season road trip.

Over 12 big-league seasons managing the Padres, Cubs, Mariners, and Nationals, Riggleman has compiled a .445 career winning percentage. I heard today on the radio (but have not verified myself) that this is the worst percentage in baseball history among managers who have managed during 12 MLB seasons or more. Multiply the .445 winning percentage by a 162-game season, and Jim Riggleman-managed teams have averaged 72 wins. This exceeds the 60-win bad-team baseline, to be sure, but enough 60-win seasons would doom a manager to a very short managerial career -- certainly, fewer than Riggleman's dozen seasons.

Riggleman's 2012 contract option with the Nationals reportedly carried a salary of $700,000. Presumably you can hire him next season to manage your team for the same, modest price. Or, you can bring in someone else with managerial experience for a bit more, as the Pittsburgh Pirates did this season by hiring former Colorado manager Clint Hurdle for about $1,000,000. Hurdle's career winning percentage in 7 seasons with the Rockies was .461, translating to 75 wins per season, or a WOR (Wins Over Riggleman) of 3. We seem to have established, based on absurdly limited data, that the Pirates paid $100,000 per WOR for their new manager.

(Indeed, 75 wins is a reasonable expectation for the P-Rats this year. Whether they overpaid or underpaid for Hurdle will be left as an exercise for the reader.)

Alternatively, Pittsburgh could have hired former Pirate, Phil "Scrap Iron" Garner, with a career WOR of 6, or Ken Macha, originally from Western PA, with an impressive, if shorter career WOR of 15. However, Macha's early career with the A's might be overvalued, in terms of WOR, with A's GM Billy Beane's stats-driven organization a more likely cause of the team's long-term success. Moreover, Macha had just come off a disappointing Brewers stint (WOR of 7).

Or, the Pirates could have hired a rookie manager with no established WOR, as the Brewers did in replacing Macha with Mike Scioscia's former assistant, Ron Roenicke. Roenicke faces a trial by fire. Brewers' GM Doug Melvin brought in front-line, free-agent starters Zack Greinke and Sean Marcum and kept slugger Prince Fielder for his contract year, widely assumed to be his last in Milwaukee. The expectations for the Brew Crew in 2011 are enormous, and it could be now or never -- which means that, for Roenicke, the only statistic that matters is WOL (Wins Over LaRussa).